Sunday, May 15, 2005

"From beyond the stars"

"I hear the Crawling Chaos that calls from beyond the stars" - The Necronomicon"We have a calling from beyond the stars" - George W. Bush, January 19, 2005The Bush Mythos

HP Lovecraft wrote that "the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Increasingly, it seems to me that mercy is being withheld from us.

Perhaps it's an Internet thing: the digitization of data has enhanced our own Random Access Memory. That isn't to say we're necessarily correlating correctly - even if everything's connected, that doesn't mean our model of how they connect is accurate - but more than ever, we're seeing dots. What we do with them is becoming the question of our time. And it's on the meta-level of myth that some of the most significant connections can be made.

I doubt that George W Bush knew, as he delivered his speech at the "Celebration of Freedom" concert on the eve of his second inaugural, that its most memorable line was straight out of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. His speech writers also were likely unaware that their prose evoked nothing so much as the "Great Old Ones" from beyond space and time. But that's the thing about a myth, even one created by a pulp fiction writer: you needn't even know it exists to become a part of it.

Intentional or not, the nod to Cthulhu was apt. Lovecraft's apocalypse is of awakened Elder Gods who resume their rule of Earth when humanity becomes sufficiently like them: "free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the Earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom." Now that sounds like a crusader religion fit for the Pentagon. (I could see the promise of "new ways to kill" being the subject of a flurry of memos.) And Bush seems to be doing as much to hasten this End of the World as he is that of his supposed Christian faith.

Of course Lovecraft was writing fiction. Though as we noted here, Michael Aquino has written several Cthulhu-derived ritual ceremonies, and Kenneth Grant of the Typhonian OTO and the Cult of Lam regards Lovecraft as an unwitting prophet of the Left Hand Path. (Consider the gravity with which some hold Lovecraft's "prophetic fiction" here, in a treatise on the "Aeon of Cthulhu Rising.") Still, it's likely not Cthulhu calling. Though something seems to be.

"A Special Evil"

So I''ll give Bush the benefit of the doubt on Cthulhu, and believe he didn't know what he was saying. But there was another speech. And I'm afraid he knew exactly what he was saying, and also what he wasn't.

Do you remember his address to the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2003? It was his chance to win back the world on Iraq after the debacle of invasion and during the atrocity of occupation. The speech was consumed with the "War on Terrror," until this strangely discordant note was struck:

There's another humanitarian crisis spreading, yet hidden from view. Each year, an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold or forced across the world's borders. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls, and others as young as five, who fall victim to the sex trade. This commerce in human life generates billions of dollars each year -- much of which is used to finance organized crime.

There's a special evil in the abuse and exploitation of the most innocent and vulnerable. The victims of sex trade see little of life before they see the very worst of life -- an underground of brutality and lonely fear. Those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished. Those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery.

I watched the speech, and I remember how my jaw dropped when he suddenly segued from the virtues of the invasion of Iraq to the scourge of international paedophile rings. Most of his audience may have thought it an odd transition, if they thought anything at all, but I thought it something more. I knew the story of the Franklin Cover-Up. I knew this man's father, the former president, had been implicated by several minors in Lawrence King's service. I understood that paedophile rings were utilized by intelligence services to blackmail foreign dignitaries. And all this helped me process the subtext of Bush's digression: blackmail.

I thought of this again because of last week's story out of Britain, which made such an awful, appropriate follow-up to the reopening of the Atlanta Child murders investigation, that hundreds, maybe thousands of African boys are disappearing in London. Some like "Adam," to ritual sacrifice.

It's unlikely we would be able to correlate these stories without the Internet. Without the contextualizing web, it's unlikely I would have thought one might have anything to do with another. And if they actually do, how much longer will we be permitted such a processing tool?

Lovecraft went on to write: "some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

Perhaps that's it. Maybe they won't need to take the Internet from us after all. Maybe we'll hand it back, begging "Take it, please, I can't bear anymore."

1044 Comments:

Ironically, this quote describes both the individual and collective process of traumatic memory recovery … although I’m hoping there are some alternatives to going mad or a new dark age …

I have adrenalin sickness … my friend is responding to treatment, staying safe … and now I can’t switch down a gear. We’ve fought a civil war in the middle of suburbia while we watch the neighbours stroll down to pick up the paper and some milk … I wish sometimes I could point to a big, smoking bomb crater every now and again.

I’m hypervigilant but now there’s nothing to district me from a schizoid vista of denial, the public’s engagement with ‘organised paedophilia’ for as long as it is conceptual … Text with too many adjectives challenges their precious subject-object distinction and they pull away.

It’s just text.

‘Common sense’ is our worst enemy. It camouflages sightlessness and apathy and generalised ‘red-in-tooth/claw’ Darwinism. “Powerful people deserve our respect.” “People who get hurt have done something to deserve it.” “Things like that don’t happen here.”

You can't take reality for granted - you have to keep monitoring your trajectory, cos there are some very unexpected big black holes out there.

"It's unlikely we would be able to correlate these stories without the Internet. Without the contextualizing web, it's unlikely I would have thought one might have anything to do with another. And if they actually do, how much longer will we be permitted such a processing tool?"

Jeff, I think you overlook here a point that you've made, and made well, times before. Having small numbers of people out there actually knowing the truth (or at least a sense of it) in many cases makes it EASIER for elites to discredit that truth.

I'm not saying that we should give up - I'm just saying that, given the current cultural conceptions of the Internet, having an "Internet conspiracy theorist" say something is perhaps not perferable to having it completely hidden - but only just. The Internet as it even now exists can be just as much a tool of control as it can of be of liberation.

My cousin is a social worker in London dealing primarily with pedophile cases and the stories she tells are truly horrifying.

So don't take me wrong when i caution all to take the "300 missing boys" link to pedophilia with a large grain of salt. For the last few years there has been a well documented scam in England (operated primarily by Nigerians) where kids are passed around families and stay long enough just to establish welfare benefits. Maybe some of you have seen that brilliant movie "Into the West" where Gabrial Byrne is part of the irish travelling people. Near the opening scene at their campsit outside Dublin, we see him "loaning" his children to another family so as to con the visiting welfare inspector. Most people find the scene hilarious.

What troubles me is why the Met police say they do not know why the boys are missing, why they imply there are 300 individuals missing, and why they don't add the info about the scam.

"Having small numbers of people out there actually knowing the truth (or at least a sense of it) in many cases makes it EASIER for elites to discredit that truth."

Absolutely. With this post, though, I meant my focus to be the internal difference the truth, or at least a sense of the truth, might mean for us. Piecing together knowledge which is unknown to many, and dissociated to most, can put us in a strange and uncomfortable place. I'm interested in what we do, once we find ourselves there.

I've seen some news coverage of the missing African boys here in the U.K. that talks about the welfare scam, as well as mentioning that many children may go back to Africa without officials being aware of the fact. But they still quote a detective as saying they did not expect to find so many missing from the system.

Really, even if the number of ritual abuse victims is 5 out of those 300, we have a major scandal on our hands.

Jeff, I've just started following your blog, and really appreciate the connections you're drawing. Perhaps I'm too new here, but I don't quite follow what you're trying to say about blackmail as it pertains to Bush's U.N. speech. Are you saying the Bush Administration will use knowledge of other countries' elites' involvement in child slavery to achieve their own political goals on the world scene? Or that Bush himself is being blackmailed (based on his father's posited involvement in such rings, which translates to, at the minimum, a lack of plausible deniability for W.), and his grandstanding against such practices was a coded message to his handlers?

It seems to me that post-tsunami reporting exposed the prevalence of child trafficking in Southeast Asia more definitively than it has been seen by the general public in the past, and it is at least a reasonable topic for discussion at the United Nations. Whatever W.'s personal knowledge of and involvement in such crimes may be, it's possible this part of the speech was nothing more than run-of-the-mill reactionary government proselytizing.

If one can believe in the concept of good and evil and the concept that good is superior to evil, it then must follow that knowledge of the truth is a power for good. I believe that the pure knowledge of truth is a cleansing act. When enough people see the truth the scales fall away. The fable of the emperors new clothes has not survived because it is a cute story- it is there to show us that the balance shifts when truth is acknowledged. Keep up the good work Jeff and someday we will all see that they are naked.

"Piecing together knowledge which is unknown to many, and dissociated to most, can put us in a strange and uncomfortable place. I'm interested in what we do, once we find ourselves there."

Yes, there is that.

The best way to influence accepted knowledge is to have as many people as possible saying the same thing as often as possible - at the very least, the force of repitition pulls the terms of the discussion towards you.

Unfortunately - as you've pointed out before - with the ouvre of High Weirdness, there's a tremendous blockage towards ANY acceptance of these postulates as legitimate, due to the tautology of "it can't be, so it can't be." Taken with the well-documented unfortunate fates of many who decide to preach this gospel, it does lead to a pretty frustrating conclusion, especially given the sense that things are speeding up and getting worse and speeding up and getting worse.

Ultimately, we need to break down that wall of unacceptance, which means we need to convince as many people as possible to make a Paranoid Shift - which is almost always accomplished slowly and incrementally.

I know - it's time we don't have, but I think it's the only way. You get enough people who get used to the water slowly, you've got a whole pool. Maybe it's boiling by then, but it would've been, anyways.

Jeff, I think you are right about the blackmail element of Bush's speech to the UN. Yet, Bush must have known his ‘humanitarian’ concern might have cut both ways, as others, especially the French, surely have the goods on America. This sort of grand, last-resort, high-level, high-stakes blackmail seems like nothing less than a desperate stab at deterrence; Bush may have reasoned that it would be mutually-assured destruction should a real story (Franklin Redux: French or Russian style) break in any of the respectable world papers of record. We have seen, however, that several nations still refused to back the invasion and occupation and continue to give the administration a headache.

Was Bush bluffing - and was he called on it? With America’s steadily weakening world position becoming evident, we are thus seeing a steady flow of leaks and strange circumstances re: Abu Grahib, Gannon/Guckert, HST, Wilson/Plame, the “secret Bush tapes”, new pedophile investigations, new suicides, DR Griffin on CSPAN, etc. - could this all be the start of a dam burst on Bush Corp’s deceitful dam nation? The blackmail has been delivered in bulk, especially this last year as (awareness of) the stakes get higher and higher.

Time is speeding up in correlation with the increasing lies they have to spin to keep status quo reality in tact over that ever-increasing cesspool of multiplying mendacity. It takes 2 lies to cover the 1st. 4 more to cover the last 2. Etc. This is one reason perhaps why our own heads are spinning. Competing webs. Notice when you disconnect from the web, the grid, the game, how time slows back down to that old campfire storytelling speed.

"the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

Meaning "the human mind" individually or collectively? There's a wee bit of difference.

Correlation at the individual level would reveal hidden inconsistencies (everyone has those) and connections (which everyone also has). The revealed inconsistencies would no doubt be embarrassing at first but as enlightening in the end as the revealed connections. I don't detect the quality of mercy in being denied such enlightenment.

Correlation at the collective level is well beyond any human being's parametric limitations. I don't detect the quality of mercy in being denied the impossible. I detect it, e.g., in the freedom (which again, everyone also has) to read better authors than Lovecraft.

"some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

Cue spooky organ music. Those who desire "a new dark age" deserve it -- and each other. Their awakening ("peace and safety", lol) will come later, when they've succeeded in establishing it.

...But four years into the anti-trafficking program, both evangelicals and feminists are disappointed with the results. Commercial sexual exploitation of women is on the rise globally, and in many cases the United States is driving, not stopping, the trend. Countries with the most severe trafficking problems have been ignored, while others appear to have been targeted for political reasons...

Dyncorp gets a mention:

On April 24, 2002, Ben Johnston, a helicopter mechanic for DynCorp in Bosnia, testified to Congress about DynCorp employees who were allegedly buying women and girls to keep in their homes as sex slaves. Yet, despite the president’s “zero tolerance” directive and the development of laws that would hold contractors responsible for involvement in sex trafficking, DynCorp remains in good standing as a U.S. contractor, and in 2003 was awarded a no-bid contract to “re-establish police, justice and prison functions in post-conflict Iraq.”

"Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

Oddly enough, the most complete fictional statement of that situation appears not in anything Lovecraft wrote, but in Isaac Asimov's classic hard science fiction story, "Nightfall."

And even more oddly, the intolerable revelation in that story -- which causes the characters first to go mad and then to flee into the peace and safety of a new dark age -- is simply that they live in a universe much vaster than they have ever realized.

For slightly over a century now, we on Planet Earth have been struggling to accept this same realization. The fact of the matter is that we live on a very small world in one corner of a very large universe. All the most contentious issues of our time -- from creationism to global warming to the Neocon dream of world hegemony -- grow out of various attempts to deny this fact and hold onto the illusion that the tiny pinpoint of space-time where we currently happen to hang our hat is an all-in-all that can be fully known and controlled.

Like it or not, we are part of a larger cosmic and evolutionary system. Whether the alien entities that have been discussed here are real intruders from that larger system or simply symbolic representations of our own intimation that such a system exists is fairly irrelevant. What matters is that we come to terms with the *true* vistas of reality and our *true* position therein -- and that we do so not on a basis of Lovecraftian fear and denial, but simply because it is our obvious next move as human beings.

"Bush must have known his ‘humanitarian’ concern might have cut both ways, as others, especially the French, surely have the goods on America. This sort of grand, last-resort, high-level, high-stakes blackmail seems like nothing less than a desperate stab at deterrence;...mutually-assured destruction..."

Yes, well said; Bush's homily does hint strongly at a new MAD. Of course, destroying millions with nukes is a respectable topic of conversation in polite society -- our glorious leaders openly boast of their ability to do it. But sexual bondage? "The prurient ape's defiling touch"? They dread being outed as members of that club even as they trumpet their membership in the other. With access to a first-rate bunker, the prospect of being bombed must become a lot less frightening than the prospect of being named.

Thank you for keeping the "dark shadows" of speculative thought on top and not buried because of self-protective fears of exposing yourself as a paranoiac or a wacko. Your intelligence in matters which MUST be examined is greatly appreciated.

Now...I had a somewhat different take on Bush's non sequitur before the UN in 2003. Mine was: "Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much." Wandering into a homily on the evils of sexual slavery and prostitution, at the U.N., four months or so after launching a war that he should have been playing the apologist for? It sounded more to me like damage control because other revelations were piling up in the wings, held back by a very slender ribbon, waiting to burst onto center stage.

It may have contained blackmail messaging, but the message I received was pure "cover your butt by accusing others and diverting attention" Bush**t.

Richard, you make an excellent point. Also one which reminds me of an objection to those in denial, who say things like, "If this were fascism, you wouldn't be able to say that." The point being, what difference has it made, what anyone has said?

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